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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

"This is the one policy of the Tories that I supported. There's been a massive transfer of unearned housing wealth to the elderly in recent years"

Nothing close to the size of the transfer from poor & middle class to the very, very rich.

"This is exactly how the old are eating the young."

The wealthy are explicitly trying to create a divide between young and old precisely so that the old can be relied upon to offer no resistance to student loan increases that soak the young while the young can be relied upon to offer no resistance to cuts to pensions and elderly care.

If young people are complicit in this game of divide and conquer they'll ultimately only hurt themselves.

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I remember reading that the average retired person in the UK earns more (higher _income_) than the average worker, so that's before you work out the 'wealth' bit.

And 80% of the country's wealth is with the 60+ crowd (this is getting worse, if anyone has stats that include 2015 / 2016 it'd be appreciated). As they've got both greater wealth and income than the young, and this is getting worse, I think it'd be foolish to call the problem a distraction.

This exactly: the old v. young issue is a deliberate distraction and divide-and-conquer strategy so the superrich can keep eating everyone else.

There can be more than one issue at a time, you know. It's pretty clear the increased ratio between pensioners and working people would be an issue regardless. Tax avoidance and the global race to the bottom is also a problem. I don't see why one precludes the other.

"I don't see why one precludes the other."

Sure, provided the title was changed to "the rich are eating the young and the old are doing slightly better than the young".

I don't think that was the impression they were trying to give though.

Oh, well, you're right about that, I just took as an assumption the title was humbug.

How exactly are they hurting themselves when they can clearly see the impossibility of the system surviving long enough for them to benefit from it?

The Robber baron Jay Gould once put it as "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other".

The middle and working classes are much less powerful political bloc if they are fighting each another (young/old). Hence the steady flow of articles like this one pitting "boomers" against "millenials" and vice versa.

The provision of decent pensions, free education and social welfare was affordable in the 50s-80s when the country was much poorer and the idea that it has become less affordable because we live slightly longer after many decades of massive economic growth is, to put it bluntly, economically illiterate. The money is there.

What was the difference in birth rates between 50s-80s and today? That's the more important metric in this case.

The dependency ratio went up from 15% in 1960 to 22% today.

The GDP per capita, by contrast, has increased 300% in 2005 adjusted dollars.

This is the metric that answers the question "why are pensions deemed unaffordable?", not birth/aging/death rates:

http://retired.talkingpointsmemo.com/images/productivity.png

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